Long before Robert Evans became a successful production chief at Paramount and a top producer of movies including Chinatown (1974), he was an actor -- albeit very briefly. In the 1950s he appeared in a handful of films primarily for Twentieth Century-Fox, and in what may or may not be coincidental timing given the release of Evans' new 2013 memoir The Fat Lady Sang, one of those films -- The Fiend Who Walked the West (1958) -- has now been released from the Fox vaults as a burn-on-demand DVD, available from the Fox Cinema Archives label.

It's a curiosity at best, for die-hard western fans and for the chance to see Evans play a cowboy variation of Richard Widmark's iconic Tommy Udo role in Kiss of Death (1947). The Fiend Who Walked the West is a western remake of that great film noir, with Hugh O'Brian starring here as a bank robber, Daniel Hardy, sentenced to share the prison cell of a psychotic killer with an unlikely name: Felix Griffin (Evans). Felix is due out of prison soon, and he's determined to find Dan's share of the loot, no matter how many people he must kill to find it.

Indeed, Felix's lack of any qualms about killing or torturing other human beings, no matter their gender or age, coupled with his youthful, earnest manner, is what drives audience interest here. Evans is no Richard Widmark, and in fact he tries too hard to channel Widmark with a sneering laugh and Widmark's general vocal inflections, but he nonetheless makes Felix dangerously, and compellingly, unpredictable. Hugh O'Brian is fine but is not given a chance to do much more with his role than seethe, and play rage and revenge.

Fox changed the title of this film at the last minute from The Hell-Bent Kid to The Fiend Who Walked the West as a cockamamie attempt to make audiences believe this was a hybrid of western and horror, two genres that were experiencing a surge in popularity. Yet despite some brutal violence, Fiend cannot really be called a horror film. In fact, the story evolves more into a prototype for the thriller Cape Fear (1962), with the bad guy in each clearly a terrible villain, but smart enough to keep the police (i.e., sheriff) unable to pin anything on him legally, resulting in the hero having to ultimately defend his family all by himself.

In his 1994 memoir, The Kid Stays in the Picture, Evans wrote that the role of Felix was originally intended for Elvis Presley, who was interested but ultimately decided he didn't want to be compared to Richard Widmark. Steve McQueen was next offered the role, but he came to the same conclusion as Elvis. Evans was one of five actors who were then tested for the part, along with Anthony Perkins, Eli Wallach, Sal Mineo and Ray Danton. Director Gordon Douglas liked Evans and extracted a performance out of him that was good enough to interest famed broadcaster Edward R. Murrow, who put Evans on his TV news program "Person to Person" and declared Evans would become a big star. Scripts started to pour in for the young Evans, but then Fox changed the film's title, and just like that, the scripts stopped. As Evans wrote, "Changing the title changed my life, even though my reviews were an actor's dream. Time predicted that my 'exceptional performance will be long remembered.' It wasn't."

The vintage cover art for the new DVD gives a sense of how embarrassing the title -- and the marketing -- of this film really was. Evans' bug-eyed, exaggerated visage appears in green, making him look like a Martian out of a Tim Burton picture, and the tagline reads, "The kooky killer is on the loose!"

It's rather astonishing that a major DVD distributor in this day and age would release a pan-and-scan version of any movie, but here is Fox Cinema Archives issuing just such a version of the CinemaScope Fiend Who Walked the West. Furthermore, the picture quality is not exactly crisp, demonstrating that Fox continues to use decades-old TV masters for lots of these Archive releases, and isn't bothering to invest in cleaning many of them up. Fans should always keep this in mind when it comes to Fox Cinema Archives, though the pre-1950 titles are generally better in this department. But as stated above, The Fiend Who Walked the West is a curiosity for committed fans, and they will probably be able to overlook the technical deficiencies.

One final note: The scene in Kiss of Death in which Richard Widmark pushes an old lady in a wheelchair down a flight of stairs -- one of the most famous and brutal scenes of 1940s American cinema -- is not reproduced here per se, but a western variant is shown instead that is still quite shocking.

By Jeremy Arnold